A wireless transmit/receive units (WTRUs) receives a downlink transmission from a Node-B and decodes the downlink transmission. If the decoding is not successful, the WTRU sends a pre-defined burst signifying a negative acknowledgement (NACK) to the Node-B via a contention-based shared feedback channel. The pre-defined burst may be sent only once without requiring an acknowledgement. The Node-B calibrates a downlink transmit power so that the downlink transmission is transmitted to the WTRUs with a high likelihood. The Node-B may send a downlink transmission including multiple data streams processed using different modulation and coding schemes so that a WTRU having a high signal quality decodes all data streams while a WTRU having a low signal quality decodes less than all data streams. The Node-B sends a channel quality indicator (CQI) threshold so that each WTRU determines a data stream to report feedback based on the CQI threshold and a measured CQI.